Twitter’s famous 140-character limit which has been in force since the company’s inception a decade ago might soon be a thing of the past.
According to Bloomberg, the micro blogging site is contemplating providing exemption to website links and image urls from being counted as part of the actual tweet itself. This, in turn, will free up a few more characters – 23 to be precise even after Twitter automatically shortens them – for users to better express themselves, something that often was hard to accommodate within the set 140-characters.
However, things still are being worked out and could be two weeks away before we get to have any official confirmation on this, the person privy to the matter revealed on condition of anonymity.
The 140-character limit had also earned Twitter the nickname ‘sms of the internet’. In fact, the character limit also owes its origins to the limit that standard mobile text messages imposed during the time when Twitter was being conceptualised back in 2006. That again marked an era before smartphones came into being.
The impending change though isn’t entirely unexpected considering CEO Jack Dorsey had earlier hinted at adopting measures that would be in tune to what its users expected the most out of the site. Towards that, the company earlier in the year had also considered raising the tweet length to 10,000 characters. However, that again would have been against the very ethos of the company that had stood out for its ability to shoot out short, concise bytes of information.
However, the company’s decision to exclude image and links from being part of the tweet could be a ploy to encourage users to include more media to their tweets, something that users have already been doing to beat the character limit.
Twitter had also been facing a decline in its fortunes off late which again is another reason the company is exploring other options to better suit user’s expectations. While exempting links and images from the tweet character count could be a step in that direction, more on this line could be in the anvil.
